In the /London Daily Mail/, W. G. Faulkner lately launched this proposed campaign of education by undertaking to explain various terms appearing in American moving-pictures to English spectators. Mr. Faulkner assumed that most of his readers would understand /sombrero/, /sidewalk/, /candy-store/, /freight-car/, /boost/, /elevator/, /boss/, /crook/ and /fall/ (for /autumn/) without help, but he found it necessary to define such commonplace Americanisms as /hoodlum/, /hobo/, /bunco-steerer/, /rubber-neck/, /drummer/, /sucker/, /dive/ (in the sense of a thieves' resort), /clean-up/, /graft/ and /to feature/. Curiously enough, he proved the reality of the difficulties he essayed to level by falling into error as to the meanings of some of the terms he listed, among them /dead-beat/, /flume/, /dub/ and /stag/. Another English expositor, apparently following him, thought it necessary to add definitions of /hold-up/, /quitter/, /rube/, /shack/, /road-agent/, /cinch/, /live-wire/ and /scab/,[23] but he, too, mistook the meaning of /dead-beat/, and in addition he misdefined /band-wagon/ and substituted /get-out/, seemingly an invention of his own, for /get-away/. Faulkner, somewhat belated in his animosity, seized the opportunity to read a homily upon the vulgarity and extravagance of the American language, and argued that the introduction of its coinages through the moving-picture theatre (/Anglais, cinema/) "cannot be regarded without serious [Pg015] misgivings, if only because it generates and encourages mental indiscipline so far as the choice of expressions is concerned." In other words, the greater pliability and resourcefulness of American is a fault to be corrected by the English tendency to hold to that which is established. Cecil Chesterton, in the /New Witness/, recently called attention to the increasing difficulty of intercommunication, not only verbally, but in writing. The American newspapers, he said, even the best of them, admit more and more locutions that puzzle and dismay an English reader. After quoting a characteristic headline he went on: I defy any ordinary Englishman to say that that is the English language or that he can find any intelligible meaning in it. Even a dictionary will be of no use to him. He must know the language colloquially or not at all.... No doubt it is easier for an Englishman to understand American than it would be for a Frenchman to do the same, just as it is easier for a German to understand Dutch than it would be for a Spaniard. But it does not make the American language identical with the English.[24]